Earlier this year, I submitted a story to Glimmer Train, a fine literary magazine that boasts, “Each quarterly issue presents about 260 pages of literary fiction—eight to twelve brand new stories by luminaries and fresh new voices making their way into print. A feast of fiction!” My story wasn’t accepted, but receiving the editor’s copyrighted six-page rejection by email was more than worth the effort of making my online submission.

Of course, the letter began with a thank you for letting the editorial staff read my story and informed me that they read 30,000 to 40,000 stories a year and that it was “an honor and a thrill to see the incredible range of lives and voices represented in these stories.” After that it was like no other rejection letter I had ever received. The editors went on to reassure me that, although there are way more stories than serious readers, I should never think that writing is an indulgence; since the world is complex and rich, no one person’s experience encompasses the whole of it. “Keep writing!”

Next, the letter provided ideas on how to create one’s best writing, notes about literary fiction, details about common trouble spots, ways to look at a story’s strengths and some recommended books on writing literary fiction (Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, Keith Johnston’s Impro and Clark and McGaw’s Acting is Believing.)

My favorite piece of advice from the letter is this one: “Give the story itself full reign. Let the characters express themselves, watch what they do, find out where they will take the story. This will save you from getting to be/having to be the clever one, and–more importantly–makes the writing process one of discovery and of service to the story.”

I also enjoyed reading this advice: Literary fiction must be “intellectually engaging and emotionally significant.” Readers must experience the characters’ challenges, concerns and situation and feel that their understanding of what it means to be human is “deepened or broadened.”

Although I thought I’d done that with the story I submitted and vowed to resubmit it somewhere else, I wanted to work on a new story using the letter’s advice as my inspiration. I wanted to find a character or two who would show me their stories. I wanted to listen to them. Here’s what I did to locate these characters in my imagination:

I listed three people who bothered me. Irritation is always a great starting place for me in writing:

1. the insensitive man who used to be my neighbor; after telling me how much his wife loved the deer where we live, began throwing sticks at them within four months of moving into his new house.
2. the retired shipping agent who lives nearby and is un-tastefully filling his yard up with a hodgepodge of things he always dreamed of putting around his dream house–a wishing well, a corral-style fence, a pirate flag, and electric candles on the deck.
3. a single older woman I know who has made it very difficult for neighbors I like to build their house because she keeps approaching the building department with nuisance stop work requests.

I then put each of these characters I knew in a fictional situation that I thought would be a difficult for them, because a story develops because something has happened in a character’s life that is different than what usually happens:

1. I imagined that the insensitive man’s grown son had died suddenly but the man refused to believe it.
2. I imagined that the man with the hodgepodge yard suffered a stroke and could no longer play his music or build odd things in his yard.
3. I imagined that the woman who was upset about the house building was contacted by a twenty-year-old claiming to be the daughter she had give up for adoption.

Creating something difficult in the lives of each of the three people peaked my interest in stories I could write. I had to make these people fictional now, to be free of the stories I knew about them, so I gave them each a different life to lead–the stick throwing man had been mentoring his son in business, I decided; the retired shipping agent wasn’t a widow but had been living in a household with his wife, her elderly friend and a long time buddy who he plays music with, and the difficult woman wasn’t a health department worker but an estate sale coordinator.

What action could they take and begin to reveal their story, their needs and desires?

1. The deer hating man decides he has to go on a buying trip for his late son’s generator business.
2. The diagnosed retired shipping agent decides to leave his dream house and roommates and ride the trains he had retired from.
3. The estate sale coordinator is coordinating a sale for a widow whose daughter is overcome with grief after a break up.

Which character in which life situation most interested me? For whom would I enjoy combining facts of a life I’d observed with facts I was making up? I decided it was the man who just can’t bear the thought of his son’s death and so goes on a buying trip on his behalf. What could happen in a generator vendor’s office or on the way home with a contract that would make the father break down? Would there be deer on the road on the way home? Would he want to throw sticks until he breaks down? Would he figure out that he has always chased away what annoyed him, that he can’t do that this time? How would the pain of acceptance begin?

I hadn’t any idea, but I knew I would like to know. I didn’t know anything about generator vendors but thought that “sustaining power” when conventional sources are down was a good metaphor for what the man was doing in his denial.

As long as I am interested in growing my understanding of the emotional world by writing the story, I’ll keep writing. And that’s the best reason to write, according to Glimmer Train editors: “Absolutely no one has ever seen the world through your eyes except you, and when you die, most of your vision of the world will die with you, if you have not written it down.”

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When I sat down to write about the man, I called him Wendell. My intention was to keep the secret about his son having died so that the man’s denial would not at first seem to be denial.

Here are two paragraphs that arrived for me:

Wendell walked into his son’s empty office, crossing to the grey metal industrial desk under the room’s two high windows. He remembered the day he and his son had gone together to the Boeing Surplus store to buy it, the truck they’d driven down. He remembered how they had talked as they loaded the large desk into the truck bed, and the Big Macs they’d eaten with fries and milkshakes on the way home. They agreed the desk was serviceable, something to get him started. He could always buy a different, more stylish one later, when his business succeeded. And now this year it had been succeeding. Only yesterday, his son mentioned he was thinking of expanding his services. Now that Northwest winter storms blew stronger each winter and power poles and grids went down regularly, representing a home generator business seemed prudent. A generator that stayed connected and shifted to serve the household should the regular supply be interrupted seemed a grand idea. Wendell saw the Maine Power Systems’ generator brochures under a stack of books about birding. Right, he remembered, his son was going to take that up as a hobby, a way to make sure he spent some time away from machines and pipes. He was going to go to Maine this September and combine a birding adventure in Acadia National Park with a visit to the generator vendors he’d contacted. Maine was advertising how it was powering up with back-up generators.

Wendell flipped through the brochures. He realized that he was going to take himself on that business trip. He was going to call the Maine vendor and make an appointment to consider which product was right for the area out in the Northwest. In fact, he would stop at LL Bean on the way and get some binoculars. He was going to go birding, too. He replaced the brochures exactly as they were before he lifted them from under the birding book, angled a little toward the light.

I read this and I saw that I might have written an opening paragraph and an ending paragraph to a story. What comes in the middle would be the story of Wendell revealing that his son had died, what their relationship was like, what he couldn’t accept, how his son had berated him for throwing sticks at deer, that they’d gotten along after that but his son was too gentle in his opinion. I began to think that the trip would be something that happens post story, the decision about making it being what shows readers that Wendell has moved in his grieving process from shock or denial to figuring out a way of resurrecting his son’s soul in himself.

In this exercise, I thought of people I knew and what made them seem like characters in a story to me. I thought of something difficult that could happen in their lives and then developed a fictional life for them in which this difficult thing would happen. Then I freewrote what I thought was an opening to a story driven by the character I choice to write about. What I discovered was that I thought I had written an opening and an ending and needed a middle and writing that interested me. It was certainly worth having a copy of Glimmer Train’s rejection letter.

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Write a story to submit and see what happens–win or not, you will receive something of value. You will have started and shaped a story!